Thursday, June 23, 2011

The origin of the WOM - the "Write Only Memory": "An engineer at Signetics, frustrated by the long and useless sequence of approvals for data sheets (during which no actual checking occurred), once made up a spec for a 'Write Only Memory' (a 'WOM') and sent it along with a batch of other data sheets to be approved. After all, if you are selling 'Read Only Memories', why not have a 'Write Only Memory'? It's perfectly logical - - which is why the managers saw nothing wrong with the data sheet."